Climate Change

Climate Change

What we all can do to save this fragile planet

Climate Change is simply the most pressing issue of our time. It is the biggest threat to human health and the health of the planet in the 21st Century.

The war on climate change has two major fronts: the fight against global deforestation and the battle to stop the burning of fossil fuels. Lose either of these battles and we lose the war. The film below, 2 Degrees, weaves together stories of a top-down and bottom-up approach to climate change and the charismatic people driving them forward.

Don’t flush electricity down the toilet! One of the biggest uses of electricity for local councils are the pumping stations pumping water to your home, and sewage away from it. So if its yellow, let it mellow: don’t flush when you pee. This will save water AND electricity. Leave a sign in your loo explaining what you are doing to educate your guests.

Don’t fill the kettle more than you are going to use.

Take shorter showers: this saves electricity heating the water and electricity pumping the waste water away from your home. Don’t run taps harder than necessary.

For single lever (mixer) taps, ensure they are always set to cold. If set in the middle, they will run hot water out of the tank and into the pipes, which will probably not even reach the sink before you turn it off. But you’ve wasted all that hot water.

When driving, leave home 5 mins earlier than you normally would and drive at 80-90km/h. This saves significant amounts of petrol than when driving at 100km/h.

PRESSURING GOVERNMENTS & CORPORATIONS:
Our Governments are happy to do next to nothing on climate change because they believe we don’t really care. That it’s not an electoral issue!
Show them how wrong they are. Once a week, phone your local MP’s office and tell them what you’ve done to reduce your own emissions, and ask them what they’re doing to reduce theirs. Write a weekly letter to State and Federal MPs, not just your own, doing the same thing. Remind them that climate change is the pre-eminent issue on which you’ll be deciding how to vote at the next election. Keep asking them what they are doing to reduce their own personal carbon emissions, and push your own favourite means: renewable energy, phasing out coal fired power stations, stopping the fossil fuel subsidies to the mining industry, stopping deforestation, etc.
Write to all the big corporations, and ask them what they are doing to reduce their carbon emissions. Remind them there are always competitors products available…

JOIN OR START CLIMATE CAMPAIGN GROUPS:
Find out if there’s a local climate action group in your area and join in. If not, talk to your neighbours about starting one. Its not as scary as you’d think.